Is your restaurant doing all it can to save water?
Cape Town may be over the worst drought in over a century thanks to the winter rains, but the Western Cape is still under strict water restrictions and now is not the time to go back to water-wasting habits.
In the restaurant industry, there are many ways water is wasted and equally as many waterwise solutions.
Everyone needs to stay involved in water-saving efforts and you need to be confident that your restaurant is doing all it can to save water.
If you haven’t considered any of the following water-saving practices yet, it’s time to climb on board and reduce your water wastage.
Recycling water systems
If you manage a restaurant that’s constantly busy for breakfast, lunch and dinners, then you should use your profits to invest in a recycling water system. PROXA South Africa have mobile water recycling systems that can be rented on a short- or long-term basis, depending on the need. This is a great way to test out the system of taking grey and wastewater and recycling it back into potable water that can be used again in the restaurant.
Should you find it a cost-effective system, you could always work with PROXA to provide a permanent on-site water recycling system service for your restaurant and continually be known as the restaurant who operates under waterwise practices. And PROXA South Africa has a wide reach all over the country with PROXA Paarl as their head office in the Western Cape and Johannesburg in Gauteng.
This will be the greatest water-saving feature in your restaurant. Now, let’s take a look at the smaller things you can do. After all, if there’s anything we’ve experienced with the Day Zero threat, every drop counts.
No ice
Something you can do (easily now in winter) is stop serving ice unless it’s specifically asked for. Most of the time, customers choose not to use their ice-filled glass for their drink anyway. And when it comes to using ice buckets for wine and champagne, invest in wine-cooler sleeves that can be left in the freezer until needed and do the same job as a bucket of ice, just without any of the water usage.
To make up for not offering ice, you’ll need to make sure that all your cold drinks are, indeed, kept chilled enough to still satisfy the customer. Make sure your refrigerator temperatures are set correctly and that when you restock, you take note of which are the colder cans and bottles, so as not to need ice.
Use fewer glasses
Speaking of cans and bottles, that’s all you should be serving your drinks out of if you can help it. By using fewer glasses for the majority of drinks, you can save litres of washing up water and unnecessarily washing glasses that weren’t even used but have lemon and ice in it, so, therefore, “needs” to be cleaned. Save yourself the trouble and your water metre the unnecessary units.
Most drinks come in a tin can, glass or plastic bottle and that’s perfectly acceptable for your guests to drink out of. Provide them with biodegradable or metal straws (while you’re saving water, you may as well start saving the rest of the planet too), from which they can drink out of these cans and bottles.
Now, there aren’t any ways to get around wine glasses because it’s not acceptable to drink straight from the wine bottle. So, in those cases, what you can do is limit each customer to one wine glass each instead of providing a new one every time a new wine bottle is opened.
Change your cooking methods
There’s no denying that certain cooking methods require more water than others. If you want to be serious about saving water in your restaurant, you should consider changing a few of your cooking methods and possibly even change your menu slightly.
For example, there are practically waterless ways to cook pasta that won’t require the use of an extra pot or a full pot of water to boil the pasta in. Other water-saving cooking methods are steaming vegetables over boiling them, frying foods and making one-pot meals.
Buckets all around
Then there are the general water saving tips that should remain implemented in your restaurant. You should have buckets everywhere. Buckets in all the sinks, buckets for rinsing vegetables, buckets for melted ice or leftover water from glasses and boiling pots and buckets for water runoff from defrosting products.
All this water should be collected and reused within the restaurant. For cleaning, soaking dishes, flushing the toilet or to be put into your water recycling system to be treated and then reused. Buckets are how households are saving water and it’s a simple system that can be used in your restaurant as well.
If you get creative enough, there are thousands of ways to save water. You need to find the methods that can work the best for your business and encourage your competitors to do the same.